Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and...

Transparency and accountability are often regarded as crucial for good governance and the efficient organization of public affairs. To systematically explore the impact of transparency and accountability on cooperation, we conduct a series of laboratory experiments on a variation of the public...

In this paper we analyze how ratification uncertainty impacts the optimal terms of international environmental agreements (IEAs). We relax the frequent assumption of countries as unitary actors by modeling the ratification stage through uncertain preferences of a ratifying agent (e.g. the...

To meet its commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, the EU plans to implement an emissions trading system with grandfathering of allowances. Besides having distributional impacts, the choice of the grandfathering scheme may affect efficiency if firms anticipate how future allocations depend on...